Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part One - The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry

Release Date: April 1, 2025 | Behind the Bastards by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction to the Dark Side of Autism Cures

In this harrowing episode, host Robert Evans delves deep into the perilous world of fraudulent autism "cures." He underscores the tragic consequences of misguided treatments that masquerade as solutions but often result in devastating outcomes for vulnerable children.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans [04:13]: "We're gonna talk about the history of quack snake oil cures that kill children in an attempt to cure them of autism."

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2. The Tragic Case of Thomas Cooper

Robert narrates the heartbreaking story of Thomas Cooper, a five-year-old diagnosed with ADHD and sleep apnea. Thomas was subjected to hyperbaric therapy—a legitimate medical treatment when properly administered—but at the Oxford Center, critical safety protocols were blatantly ignored. As a result, Thomas was engulfed in flames within a hyperbaric chamber due to a spark from improper attire, leading to his immediate and fatal ignition.

Key Points:

• Safety Failures: The Oxford Center neglected essential safety measures, such as maintenance checks, having licensed technicians, and ensuring patients wore grounding straps.
• CEO's Negligence: Tamela Peterson, the CEO, fled the scene and attempted to erase evidence, further demonstrating her irresponsibility.
• Fatal Outcome: Thomas died instantly, and his mother suffered third-degree burns while trying to rescue him.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans [13:34]: "His last moments of life were being engulfed in flames and perishing in front of his mother."

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3. Historical Context: Autism Diagnosis and the Biomedical Movement

Robert provides a comprehensive overview of how autism has been historically misunderstood. Initially misclassified alongside conditions like psychosis and schizophrenia, autism was wrongly attributed to parental neglect—a misconception propagated by figures like Bruno Bettelheim. This stigma fueled a desperate search for "cures," giving rise to the biomedical movement that prioritizes unverified treatments over scientific evidence.

Key Points:

• Evolution of Diagnosis: Until the 1980s, autism was often misdiagnosed, leading to widespread stigma and misplaced blame on parents.
• Shift in Understanding: Modern perspectives view autism as a developmental condition rather than a psychiatric illness, reducing parental stigma but not eliminating the desperate quest for cures.
• Rise of Biomedical Activism: Influenced by flawed diagnostic frameworks, activists began promoting treatments like chelation therapy and hyperbaric chambers, ignoring scientific consensus.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans [22:54]: "Autism has been considered like a disease... treated as if it's like a plague."

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4. The Rise and Collapse of Secretin as a 'Miracle Cure'

Secretin, a hormone initially utilized to stimulate digestive fluids, was touted as a groundbreaking treatment for autism after anecdotal reports suggested dramatic improvements in children. Media outlets quickly amplified these claims, showcasing sensational before-and-after videos. However, subsequent rigorous double-blind studies unequivocally demonstrated Secretin's ineffectiveness, leading to its decline in popularity.

Key Points:

• Initial Hype: Secretin was hyped based on limited and unscientific studies, leading to widespread parental adoption despite lack of evidence.
• Scientific Rejection: Multiple clinical trials failed to validate Secretin's efficacy, revealing it as an ineffective treatment.
• Financial and Emotional Toll: Families invested substantial resources into futile treatments, experiencing both financial strain and emotional devastation.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans [56:22]: "Within six months, a double-blind study of 60 children had come to very different conclusions. Secretin was at best useless."

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5. Emergence of Chelation Therapy and the Death of Tariq Nadama

Building upon the discredited Secretin craze, the biomedical movement shifted focus to chelation therapy—a legitimate treatment for heavy metal poisoning but grossly misapplied to children with autism. Tariq Nadama's tragic death epitomizes the lethal consequences of such misuse.

Key Points:

• Misapplication of Chelation: Intended for heavy metal detoxification, chelation was wrongly prescribed to autistic children without evidence of metal poisoning.
• Tariq's Story: At just five years old, Tariq underwent aggressive chelation treatments, including dangerous rapid IV infusions while being restrained, leading to his death from cerebral hypoxic ischemic injury.
• Regulatory Failures: The practitioners involved lacked proper oversight, and despite clear negligence, legal repercussions were minimal.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans [77:16]: "He was shotgunning hours worth of medication into his body and his 5-year-old body in 5 to 10 minutes while he's strapped to a board."

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6. Key Figures and Organizations in the Fraudulent Cure Industry

The episode sheds light on pivotal actors within the biomedical movement, including:

• Bernard Rimland: Founder of the Autism Research Institute, Rimland initially sought to counter the blame placed on parents but later became entangled in anti-vaccine rhetoric.
• Sue Palmer and Kenneth Bach: Early proponents who conflated autism with other developmental disorders, expanding the target demographic for unverified treatments.
• Dr. Anju Usman: A disillusioned physician whose personal tragedies led her to promote dangerous treatments like chelation therapy, directly contributing to Tariq Nadama's death.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans [41:08]: "The physicians who were interested in Dan were not, as a rule, people in the prime of their career functioning within their chief area of medical compass."

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7. Conclusion: The Devastating Impact of Pseudoscience on Vulnerable Families

Robert Evans concludes by emphasizing the dire consequences of the pseudo-medical practices promoted by the biomedical movement. Families, driven by fear and misinformation, fall prey to exploitative treatments that promise hope but deliver tragedy. The episode serves as a stark warning against the allure of unproven "cures" and the paramount importance of adhering to evidence-based medical practices.

Notable Quote:

Robert Evans [56:22]: "Parents may feel helpless... the worst thing you can do is try to go be a hero and add a casualty to the situation."

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Final Thoughts

"Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry" is a sobering exploration of how fear and misinformation can lead to catastrophic outcomes. By exposing the unethical practices of certain individuals and organizations, the episode advocates for informed medical choices and the protection of vulnerable children from dangerous, unproven treatments.

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Note: Timestamps correspond to the transcript provided and may vary slightly based on the final podcast editing.

Transcript

[James Stout]

Hi, everybody, it's James here. If you don't listen to what could happen here, you might not recognize me. My name is James Stout and I'm the guy who pops onto this feed every few months to tell you something very sad and then ask for your money. And that's why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck Myanmar today. The day I'm recording this, which is Friday 28th March, it was 7.7 on the Richter scale. We know of more than 100 deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much, much, much higher. Lots of the telegraph and Internet infrastructure has been taken out by the earthquake, and the junta restricts Internet and social media access. So we don't really know the full extent of the death, but we can imagine it will be very high as one of the areas most affected was Mandalay, which is the second largest city in Myanmar. I've spoken to half a dozen sources in Myanmar today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before. They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things. Were they as bad as they were at the time of Cyclonagus, which was a terrible disaster in 2008? If you would like to support the people of Burma who are currently fighting against tyrannical dictatorship, as well as dealing with the consequences of this natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can do so. I was actually already running a fundraiser on my Patreon for Mobier PDF. They are a casualty evacuation team in Southern Shan State. Right at the fiercest part of the fighting. Right? They don't fight. What they do is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured and they provide medical services to internally displaced people. They've been doing this since 2021. They're incredibly brave people and they've saved more than 300 lives. You can read more about them by going to my Patreon post, which also includes all the links for donation. The website for that is tinyurl.com help myanmar. That's tinyurl.com h e l p my a n if you'd like to donate somewhere else, an organization that you can donate to is the Free Burma Rangers. Free burmarangers.org They're a fantastic NGO. They've been doing a lot of medical work in the liberated zones of Myanmar for a very long time. They've also worked in Rojava and lots of other places around the world where people need help. I spoke to Dave from FBR today. He's well and he told me that they're already Starting to respond to the disaster. So to donate to them free. Burmarangers.org thanks very much. We appreciate your support.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast that is happening right now to your ears. There's nothing you can do about it except for, like, turn off your phone or your headset, but don't do that. Listen to these great episodes that we have with my good friend Mangesh. Mangesh, welcome to the program.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Thank you so much for having me. Robert and Sophie, I'm thrilled to be here.

[Dave]

Mango's here.

[Robert Evans]

Thrilled to have you. Mango, you used to work at the company that we currently work at, and now you're independent. You're a pirate flying your own flag in the middle of the sea. But the sea is podcasts.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah. I mean, a jolly pirate, I hope, but all pirates are jolly.

[Dave]

And you co host a podcast with our boss and friend Will Pearson, called Part time genius. Our boss friend, but friend and boss. Notice how I ordered that? And people should listen to it. It makes me. It's like a podcast that'll make you happy. You'll get to learn a thing, but it'll be fun.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

That is so sweet. It really is. It's like the way that we used to talk in college. Really nerdy and late into the night and just making each other laugh. And it feels nice that we get to do that still all these years later.

[Robert Evans]

Excellent.

[Dave]

That's beautiful. You're not gonna feel good after we tell you what we're talking about today.

[Robert Evans]

What we're gonna talk about today is not something that will make you feel good.

[Dave]

It's gonna make you feel really bad.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Oh, no. We're gonna talk about the history of quack snake oil cures that kill children in an attempt to cure them of autism.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh, my gosh.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not laughing at that. That's horrible. Which is why we're talking about it. But it's such a fucked, like, excited.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

To come here and just, like, have a box of popcorn and listen to you tell me stories.

[Robert Evans]

10,000 words of some of the bleakest shit you've ever heard is about to be coming your way. Congrats.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh, no.

[Robert Evans]

Thanks for showing up this week.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

I can't wait.

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

Bobby Bones here with news on the top shelf. Country Cruise setting sail February 27 to March 6, 2026. It's not just a cruise. It's a country music experience at sea. An amazing lineup of performers. Well, we're going to be there. The Bobby Boncho. I'm going to be there. Keith Urban, lee Bryce, Scotty McCreary, Parmalee, LeAnn Rimes. It doesn't end there. We'll also be stopping in stunning destinations along the way. Go to topshelfcountrycruise.com to book any available stateroom. Gotta hurry though. These spots are filling up fast. Captivating and action packed. The Blood and Ash series by number one New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L. Armentrout is a sexy, addictive series perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros. Chosen at birth to usher in a new era, Poppy's life is not hers. A maiden in solitary waiting for the day of her ascension, Poppy would rather be with the gods fighting the evil that took her family. The entire kingdom rests on her shoulders. When Hulk, a guard bound to protect, enters her, he tempts her with the forbidden. A kingdom, blood and ash. A thrilling, steamy escape. Available in print, ebook and audiobook. So, you know, I'm gonna start this by saying we're talking about like autism, quote, unquote cures. There's no way to cure autism, which a thing is a thing we now understand is like a condition. It's a way some people are, but it is treated often still as a disease that needs to be eradicated, as if it's like a plague. And a lot of harm comes from kind of the discrepancy between the reality of the situation and how a great deal of people see it. And this week we're gonna talk about the, specifically the Grifters, a group called the Biomedical movement, which is these are all people who are adjacent to guys like Andrew Wakefield. They're all people who sell different kinds of, we're talking about like chelation therapy and shit. All sorts of different, like treatments and cures. They call them interventions. And ultimately the impact of all of this stuff is that it poisons a lot of children.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

So the inciting incident for me working on these episodes, and maybe you heard about this story, Mangesh, is on January 31, a five year old child suffering from ADHD and sleep apnea was admitted to the Oxford center in the Detroit suburb of Troy for treatment. Now that name, the Oxford center, sounds great, right? That sounds like a legitimate place of medical science, right? Oxford, we all know that's a good name. That means something real, has nothing to do with the college, has nothing to do with academics at all. It is instead at a place where parents take their children to have unproven medical experiments conducted on them for profit. One of those experiments was the use of hyperbaric therapy to treat ADHD and sleep apnea. Now to be very clear, hyperbaric therapy is a thing, It's a very real medical thing, right? Like, I think it got its start in use. Basically it's like pressurizing and oxygenating like an area, a room, or in the case of what this kid was being put in a little glass tube. But it starts with like, you have people diving. And when you're diving, particularly at like certain depths for too long, you get like all of these gases building up in your blood. And if you like surface, even if you're doing it slowly, there's a certain point at which you can't surface on your own slowly enough to like have that stuff dissipate and not fuck you up. So you go into a hyperbaric chamber and it basically purges.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh, that, that's for like the bends or whatever, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Essentially this is like people who are doing like very deep sea, like when they're welding at the bottom of like oil rigs and stuff, that's one of the things use this for. But they found there's other things hyperbaric chambers are great for actually over, over the years because it oxygenate it like forces so much oxygen into your tissues. There are people who have certain kind of like injuries that won't heal like people with diabetes. Right. Often can get injuries in, like their feet that don't heal. A hyperbaric chamber can like, force the healing process to start, basically.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Don't they use it for like NFL players or like, there's some. I feel like certain athletes do it.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And there's some discussion that there may be some like, benefits there. That's when we get more into the snake oil. Right. Because much of what hyperbaric chambers used for is not the stuff where it's proven to help. You know, again, there's maybe some sports medicine benefits to it. And there's stuff like if you have radiation injuries, hyperbaric chambers can help. So there are some real uses. These are actually very. This is actually a very powerful therapy for certain proven things. However, there's no evidence that it does anything for ADHD or sleep apnea. 0oh man. Just not things that it helps with. But there's this widespread belief that comes out of this biomedical movement for like, trying to treat and cure autism that hyperbaric chambers are useful for that. And I know I said this kid has ADHD and sleep apnea. Kind of the gist of the story that we'll be telling is an awful lot of these same people believe ADHD is another type of autism, which is not the mainstream scientific consensus.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

That's what my understanding was.

[Robert Evans]

But that is part of why this gets lumped in. And it gets lumped in because you can then sell hyperbaric therapy to more people with kids, right? Sure, sure. So again, hyperbaric chambers, pretty cool. But they're not useful for the problems that this 5 year old kid, Thomas Cooper, had. And because the Oxford center existed to take money from parents with kids who had autism and other stuff going on, they didn't really care about scientific rigor or even basic safety protocol. So here's the thing about doing a therapy like this. You have essentially like 100% oxygen. Now, do you remember Mangesh, what happened to that Apollo mission that back when they were using 100% O2 inside of the spacecraft?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

It doesn't seem like a smart idea.

[Robert Evans]

It caught on fire on the inside and everyone died a horrible death.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now there's a way to deal with this. Right. Because there's a part of the benefit of a hyperbaric chamber when it's useful is how much oxygen there is in there and the way that the pressure works with that. But when you have this much oxygen, you have to take a lot of weird precautions to make sure that everyone inside the Chamber doesn't get incinerated. So among other things, if you're in a properly run hyperbaric chamber, you are going to be only wearing cotton fabric, right? Because wool and polyester can cause extremely tiny sparks when it rubs against other fabrics or whatever in such an environment. And normally you don't notice that, but the smallest spark can cause an explosive fire that instantly burns you to death. Right. That's insane. The other thing that you do if you putting someone in this, in addition to making sure they're wearing the right fabric, is you put a grounding thing on their wrist. Right. If you've ever, like, built computers out of parts, you've used one of these. And it's to stop you from, like, a static discharge from fucking up this very precious machinery that you're putting inside of a box. We put those on a person, and that also reduces the risk. Right. None of this was done in this situation. This kid was wearing whatever he was. I think he was wearing polyester, right? And he was. He had, like, a polyester blanket, too. Nobody really made sure. And he wasn't grounded, right. And so at one point, he, like, turned over and there was a spark, and his entire body immediately ignited. And the hyperbaric chamber he was in was a small glass tube just big enough for a person's body. So he had no move. There's no escaping. There's no way to get out. He is just in a tube of glass on fire. His mom, who's sitting nearby. There's no medical professionals nearby. Breaks, tries to break him out.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

No medical professionals nearby.

[Robert Evans]

No, of course not. Of course not. Again, this isn't a medical procedure, really. You know, it should, but that's not.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

How they're treating it. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

No. Yeah. So his mom is sitting nearby, and she tries to break into this contraption and suffers third degree burns to her arms trying to save her little boy. Her lawyer later said it's literally the worst thing any parent could experience. And poor Thomas, his last moments of life were being engulfed in flames and perishing in front of his mother. He was certainly aware of what was going on. Oh, my God. And yeah, the kid dies.

[Dave]

And unimaginably horrible.

[Robert Evans]

As an aside, every time this happens, the person dies. This is a hundred percent fatality rate problem. When it's in a chamber this small, if you're in, like, a much bigger chamber, there's, like, some ways that you could potentially escape. But when a fire, when this kind of fire happens, in this kind of condition, people don't live right like, that's just the way it is.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

And so for these treatments, are they just coming like once? Is it like one and done?

[Robert Evans]

Of course not. Nearly as much money. People do this as many times as you can get them to pay.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh, so, so like. And was this the first time that this kid had been there or had it been.

[Robert Evans]

I think this was the first time for this kid, but I'm not actually certain of that.

[Dave]

And there's no medical professional nearby? Nobody? Nothing?

[Robert Evans]

No, there's usually someone generally like a retired doctor. It's kind of like getting a pot prescription used to be where like you've got some guy who's not really, you know, he used to be a fucking ENT doctor and he doesn't do that anymore. But he like signs some paperwork.

[Dave]

No, but that was.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe he comes by once a week. Yeah, you're like, you're like, it's weed. This is. It's not fun when it's a vehicle, when it's the burn you to death chamber.

[Dave]

No, it's like, you know, you go home and Google the person who gave you the prescription and go, what up thing? Did you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, what did you. How many people did you get killed?

[Dave]

Yeah. Why do you barely have a medical license?

[Robert Evans]

Those were the days, my friend.

[Dave]

Venice speech.

[Robert Evans]

So Michigan, which is where this happens, had no rules at the time. Michigan, yeah. And there were absolutely no rules about how hyperbaric chambers had to be like maintained when you were doing stuff like there's absolutely no standards. But the government does come in, they find out that these, the Oxford center had old machines that were way past the date at which they would have needed to be refurbished to operate safely. And to make matters worse, there's like a. Because these are devices where people die if they're not working properly, there is a life cycle indicator that tells you how many times it's been used. So you know, if it has to be refurbished before further use. And they had illegally dialed back that number like you do. Like used cars dealers do on a car.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But on the death chamber that burns children alive. Wow. Further investigation by the authorities found per this USA Today article, quote, the Oxford center staff failed to meet the following safety standards on the day of Thomas's death. Number one, conduct his daily maintenance check and pre dive safety check. Number two, have a medical doctor or safety supervisor at the Troy facility at the time of Thomas treatment. Number three, provide a license licensed technician to perform the treatment. Number four, require Thomas to wear a grounding strap during his treatment. None of this was done. Ultimately, both the facility safety director and the CEO of the company were charged with negligence. The CEO, Tamela Peterson, has to go down as the most irresponsible single individual in this story. When it became clear that this five year old had died in her center, detectives showed up because a five year old burnt to death. Right, you're gonna send some detectives in. And she immediately FL the scene and takes her laptop to her young son and tells him to scrub it. Great. Good mom. And immediately implicate your kid too. Excellent work. Responsible parenting. We love to see it. This is a helicopter parent, but in the sense that helicopters are extremely dangerous and kill everyone inside of them. So thankfully, again, the youth these days, not great with computers. Her kid doesn't really know how to scrub a laptop and so it doesn't get scrubbed. And I'm gonna quote from an article by the Detroit Free Press here. Still, police found electronic messages on Peterson's devices. Said Detective Danielle Trigger. Great name for a detective, by the way. Including an exchange in which Peterson sent photos of the boy's burning body and wrote something to the effect of if my leg was on fire, I would at least try to hit it and put it out. He just laid there and did nothing. She is roasting a dying five year old pictures of his corpse.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh my God. And roasting the wrong lady up.

[Robert Evans]

Also, Danielle Trigger. That's like a, that's like an airport mystery novel series character Dave, that can't be a real detective.

[Dave]

That's some Nancy Drew shit.

[Robert Evans]

It is very funny. Like if you are Danielle Trigger, you just kind of have to become a detective. Like you try to be a beat cop and there's like, no, no, no, you're going right to murders. Take off that uniform. You are putting on a trench coat. Peterson's messages also show that when she was asked whether the company was promoting hyperbaric chambers to treat erectile dysfunction, she responded, whatever gets bodies in those chambers. Lol. Jesus Christ. Lmao. Crimes. What the fuck, lady? So this is the story that got me looking into the stuff that led to the writing of this episode. We're going to be going back in time from this point, but I wanted to start kind of at the end because we're going to explain why this is a thing, right? Why there is such an industry for quack medicine like this that promises to deal with whatever learning disability or condition your child has by giving them dangerous, absolutely scientifically unverifiable interventions. And if I had to name the root cause of all of this, it would be the fact that autism has, for the most of the time that it has been in use as a diagnostic term, been considered like a disease. Right. Like an illness and generally a life ruining one. Right. And I need to separate here the diagnostic term autism from what we know today as autism, because they're very different things. As I said in our episodes, we did some episodes on a guy named Bruno Bettelheim, who was a pioneering quack in the child development and child abuse fields in the 30s and 40s. Every child who didn't behave in accordance with the desires of adults at the time was labeled as autistic. Now, there were other labels that they used. The terms psychotic and schizophrenic were used interchangeably with autism in diagnoses of kids who had basically any kind of behavioral issue up until the 1980s, which is when we started to gain a better understanding of what those terms mean.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Until the 1980s.

[Robert Evans]

That's crazy. And you will hear childhood psychosis used interchangeably with autism a bunch in the mid century. And the actual facts of the matter is that what we now call autism, we know, actually makes you less likely to develop schizophrenia, although we really don't know why. Right. It's just kind of like the data suggests that people who have been diagnosed with autism have lower rates of schizophrenia than kind of the general population. But it shows how off base people were about the basics of this stuff for a very long time. And you could view the change that occurred in the 1980s as broadly positive, which is autism stops being seen as, you know, basically childhood psychosis and starts being seen as a disorder of development. So it's no longer being treated as a psychiatric illness, which means the parents of these kids start to deal with a lot less stigma. And the fact that there was stigma to begin with does go back to our friend Bruno Bettelheim, who had argued that that quote, unquote, refrigerator moms cold mothers caused autism. Like, if your mom isn't nice enough to you, that's how you get autism. Not the truth. But this also goes back deeper to Sigmund and Anna Freud, who had posited a view of mental illness that often blamed the actions of the parents for most problems in children. Right. In other words, they weren't seeing a lot of this as genetic, as just kind of structural or chemical. They were seeing this as your mom or dad fuck up. And so you wind up with whatever illness. Right. And so there was a deep stigma if you were a parent with a kid who had any kind of developmental disorder or illness that you had done something to cause it. Right. Which is obviously very bad for parents and not any better for children. And one of the results of this is that once stuff starts to change, this first generation of parents who are starting to get closer to correct diagnoses when their kids get diagnosed with autism. Also, we're generally raised in a culture where parents have usually been blamed for what happened to their kids in this way. And that's starting to change. But they still have this deeply rooted desire to prove I'm not why this happened. Right. That's a huge part of the story that we're going to tell.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

I mean, that still must be the case. Right. There's so many high performing perfectionists, parents who have kids who are autistic and one, they don't want to believe their kids are autistic for a very long time.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

They don't see it in front of them. But that sense that you can fix it or cure it is so desperate for so many of them.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're going to talk about that. And it's also just the fact that at this point in time, when kids get diagnosed with autism, they are generally people, they're generally kids who they, number one, have other things going on. There are different kinds of developmental disorders and even physical disabilities that sometimes happen alongside autism. It's like not necessarily a causative effect, but they're correlated. And most people who we would understand today as having autism aren't being diagnosed with it. Right. Because most people who have autism are generally able to still live independent, normal lives. Most people who are getting diagnosed with it these days aren't. So there's also that attitude that this is, this is a life ruiner. Right. That's how a lot of, and I'm not saying anything bad about like people who do have more severe disorders or that like life ruining is a good way to talk about that, but that's how people are talking about it in this period of time. So there's both this stigma and this incredible fear around it. And there's also this attitude, it started to change the idea that the parent has to be to blame. But there's still this very American attitude that someone has to be to blame. Right. And all of these different factors are the real root of the biomedical movement that brings us in the 21st century. 21st century to RFK Jr. And that five year old kid burning to death in a hyperbaric tube. And you know, I think I should also state here that increasing numbers of people do not think it's responsible or good to talk about autism as a disability or as like a disorder. It's just kind of a way people are. And I tend to think there's a lot to that attitude. But again, part of the issue is that a lot of the people getting diagnosed in this period of time have other stuff. Stuff going on and have a lot of very severe problems. When I was working in special ed, all of our kids were just described me as kids with autism. But they were all, they all had a lot of severe issues. I'm not just. And I'm talking about like a lot of them were quadriplegics because of birth defects. A lot of them had had like a lack of oxygen to the brain. And so these were kids who, I mean, we dealt with grand mal seizures every single day. These were kids who were often very sick and often in a lot of pain. And that is a lot to a lot of people's understanding at the time. Just with aut is. Right. Which is not accurate. Right. One of the things that we have learned over the years, when I was teaching, and this is close to 20 years ago, I think the understanding was that something like a third of people with autism had average or above average IQs. And every few years that number has leapt up to the point that now it looks like 60% or more. And I'm sure it's basically the same distribution as the normal population. And I'm not trying to reduce everything to iq, but again, initially the people getting diagnosed. And so our understanding of what autism is is deeply skewed by the fact that most people who have it are just sort of like still living in like not getting a diagnosis and going about their day. Right. The fact of the matter is that like David Byrne and David lynch were never formally diagnosed with autism. Right?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah. No. I mean, there's an article like an opinions pie in the New York Times this week from the editor of the journal Science who has, you know, said he figured out he had autism at age 53 and was talking about how like, you know, it's made him so much better of a scientist and he sees things that other people don't. But, but also that late understanding that like he's in this field and didn't realize that he had autism until such a late period.

[Robert Evans]

And that's, I think that's like the, again, increasingly the way it's seen today and probably the right way to look at it is that like, yeah, some people, it's a different way of Being a person, you're not, like, it's not the same way everyone is, but like, it's not like an inherently like bad or deleterious thing. It's just you're different. And so there are different ways that you're going to interact with and, and view the world and different things that are going to work when like we're talking about educating people with autism. And, and again, our, our understanding of this is still very much developing, but it's in a very primitive state in the 80s and 90s. Right, right. Right now people do know Asperger's syndrome is a topic of discussion by this time in like the 80s and such. And so there is an understanding that like some of these kids are like, you know, it's this idea that like some of them get superpowers. Right. Which is not really an accurate way to view it. But like some, we do know that like there are people with autism who are like super high, like highly intelligent and capable in specific areas. But the general understanding if you get this, is that your kid is never going to live a quote, unquote, normal life life. Right. That's how people talk about it. So if you're keeping track in the late 80s and early 90s, you get a couple of things coming together. You have a generation of parents who are still used to and traumatized by the thought of being blamed for their kid's condition, who are also used to seeing autism depicted as a fate worse than death. Feeding into this complex churn is the fact that as the term autism grows to encompass more people, it loses what author and doctor Michael Fitzpatrick describes as a sense of coherence rinse. Michael wrote a great book about the biomedical movement titled Defeating a Damaging Delusion. And in it he writes, the autistic spectrum stretched from children who are non verbal to severely disabled to those who are of high intelligence but behave strangely and had no friends. The spectrum included children with Rett syndrome, a neurodegenerative disorder with an identified genetic cause with fairly superficial similarities to autism. It also included children with atypical autism or in the usa, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, a label that merely exposed the incoherence of the diagnostic framework. As one authority commented, any classification system that includes atypical versions of one entity as a separate diagnosable entity all its own has to be next to useless as the basis for scientific progress. Which is a really good point that like, yeah, there's this thing and also the opposite is also the thing. Like, it's like, yeah, that's. Maybe we didn't have it right. Maybe that's not a super useful term to be describing this as. You know, stuff like this is a moving target. And it's both worth acknowledging the harm that the fact that this is deeply incomplete and fucked up has on a lot of kids and parents at this time. And also, well, you were never gonna get this right straight away. So the confusion here is the final ingredient to what comes next. The unorthodox biomedical movement, which is how Fitzpatrick describes this movement that kind of terminates in that five year old in the tube, starts with parents who are angry and shocked that their kids are, as they see it, broken, and they're also angry and scared of the thought of being blamed themselves. The clinical definition is flawed and this produces the opportunity for them to question it, starting with a rejection of the idea that autism is, quote, purely genetic. Now, if you remember, guys like Bettelheim had argued for years that autism was caused by refrigerator moms, while science had increasingly come to the conclusion that the roots of autism were largely genetic. Now, no one ever argued that was the whole story. And in fact, an interesting thing about autism is that identical twins, in cases of identical twins, both only have autism about 90% of the time, which means there's some degree of. And when we say environment, that means something other than genetics, that's playing a role. Right. Fitzpatrick succinctly summarizes what happened next. The biomedical activists emphasize environmental rather than the constitutional factors in the causation of autism, which they insist is a biomedical metabolic or immune system disorder. While some activists seek to redefine autism as a form of mercury poisoning or as the result of some process of vaccine injury, others regard it as primarily a gastroenterological disorder. They reject the focus of the autism mainstream on genetic research, demanding the redeployment of funds into the study of putative environmental factors. And some of this is like a, a pride thing where they're like, if it's genetic, that means it's my fault. Again, which is like not, not how you should look at that. But people do too often and yeah, so we're going to be focusing on like the bastards and the quack experts kind of at the core of this movement. But we're also going to talk about a lot of these activists. I don't want to act like that's the only division happening here, though, from the flawed state of affairs in the early 1990s. You also have, like, that's not the only thing happening within kind of the community of People with autism. In the early 1990s, you start to have the first neurodiversity activists. And these are people like Jim Sinclair, who was a man with autism, who wrote in 1993 this kind of very beautiful piece in which he talked about, like, I understand why parents might mourn not having the child they had expected to have. But then he went on to write, quote, we need and deserve families who can see us and value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived. Grieve if you must for your own lost dreams, but don't mourn for us. We are alive, we are real, and we're here waiting for you and I. Yeah, we're not going to talk about that side of the story enough because this is a podcast about bad people. But I thought it would be an error not to include that.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Deeply affectable, actually. You think about these parents, obviously they spend so much time mourning the kids that they thought they'd have.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right. And trying to fix them that they're not actually there engaging with, appreciating and raising their child.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

I mean, you do that with like, like kids who don't play like the, the high school jock whose, like, kid doesn't play soccer as well as he does or whatever. Right. Like, and, and you think about the difference between, you know, that expectation versus. Versus someone who's severely autistic.

[Robert Evans]

It's this thing that happens and it's the. So much of the root of the modern fascist movement is like the parental rights movement, quote, unquote, which is really just people who want to have this ancient Roman understanding of like, I get to choose exactly who my kid becomes and. No, you don't. No one ever has. That's not how people are. Like, if you're gonna have a kid, you really need to accept that they're just gonna do whatever.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah, I know. Having two kids, I have zero control of them.

[Robert Evans]

You cannot make them into a specific. Generally you can make sure that they're not like a murderer or a horrible criminal. That's really your goal, is making sure they have empathy and the ability how to survive in the world. That's it.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Well, you should teach them to scrub a computer early, I imagine.

[Robert Evans]

You gotta, you gotta teach them to be able to fucking clear those files. My God, come on now. So we're not. Anyway, we're not gonna be talking about the Jim, Jim Sinclair's and like the neurodiversity movement nearly enough in here, but I, I wanted to kind of bring that side of it into this cause it would be irresponsible not to. Now let's get back to the cranks you know.

[Dave]

But first.

[Robert Evans]

But first, it was not a crank. Our Sponsors.

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[Robert Evans]

Ah, we're back. Boy, I love that hyperbaric chamber ad. I was thinking these things were death traps until they said 15% off. Wear whatever the fuck you want and.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Use the coupon code. Yeah, polyester.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So one of the first and most important organizations in this history is the Autism Research Institute, which was founded in 1967, and through its long life has effectively been a couple of different kinds of organization. But in its early days, at the start, it was founded by a doctor named Bernard Rimland. Rimland was a research psychologist with a son who was diagnosed with autism back in like the 50s, right, when it was blamed on cold and distant refrigerator moms. Now, Rimland is not a sympathetic character in this story. He's a bad guy. But he comes from a sympathetic start, which is that his son gets diagnosed with autism, which is blamed on the mom being cold. And he's like, that's not my wife. Right? Like, this is not on her. And he's right. It's not on his wife.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

She runs hot.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, she was a loving mother, I'm sure. And so he comes to the very reasonable belief that, like, well, then, obviously this doesn't explain autism. We're wrong about what this is, unfortunately. He decides that autism is caused by biomechanical issues triggered by what he termed environmental assurance salts. And this is the core of the anti vax movement. Right? This is the birth of it. The Very before they're really even focusing as much on that. Just this understanding that this is something environmental has fucked with my kid. And that's why they've got this right. That's where it all starts. And Rimland is a big anti vax guy, but that's like, the origin of it. Now, again, in the initial era 67, he's not being a crank for theorizing this because we don't know anything, Right? Yeah. And some of his observations are accurate. The issue is that Remlin continued to hold to his belief about environmental contagions long after the evidence put light of that. In between serving as the technical Advisor on the 1988 film Rain man, he concluded that vaccines were the, quote, prime suspect as the cause of autism due to the inclusion of a mercury based preservative known as thiomersal. So, again, this is the Rain man guy. Yeah.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

And in 1995, the Autism Research Institute launched a program known as Defeat Autism Now. Exclamation point or just Dan with an exclamation point. That exclamation point is critical. It's always used in there. And autocorrect wants me to have the next word be a new sentence, which is very annoying for me. So Dan's goal is to put together parents with physicians and researchers to collect, explore new treatments and cures with the ultimate goal of defeating autism, a condition that cannot be defeated because, again, it's just the way they are.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

I am not gonna make that point every time this comes up, but I do feel the need to emphasize it here at the jump. So Dan is the tumor, which would eventually metastasize into our entire fantasy medicine industrial complex, which itself is a major booster and contributor to the modern fascist movement. You can tie the presidency of Donald Trump directly to and the things it inculcated in our society. So the physicians who are interested in Dan were not, as a rule, people in. I don't know how else to pronounce it.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Every time you say it. I was thinking about the exclamation point. So I'm glad you're also making the audience think about it.

[Dave]

It's also gonna really be a jolt for our editor, Dan.

[Robert Evans]

Dan. So the physicians who were interested in Dan were not, as a rule, people in the prime of their career functioning within their chief area of medical compass. A doctor is not a doctor. Right. It's one of those things. If you've got a doctor who specializes in heart surgery, he could be a great heart surgeon. He probably Knows how to deliver a baby, like, intellectually, but he wouldn't be your first choice, you know, like, again, better than a regular dude.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Are you talking about Dr. Oz right now? Is that who you're talking about?

[Robert Evans]

No, I'm not even shitting on Dr. Oz. I'm just saying, like, doctors have specialties, right? I know, of course, because medicine's a big field. Again, a guy whose specialty is, like, your urinary tract, you might not want, like, examining your eyes because he's not an optometrist, not his specialty. But with stuff like this, they function on pot doctor rules, which is, hey, did you age out? Are you retired? Are you tired of being, like, a family practitioner or whatever? Come into this field, say you're an autism expert now. You'll get called a hero for prescribing anything thing, and you can keep getting money for not actually doing any work right? Now, when young medical professionals who have some actual relevant expertise get involved, it's generally because they have kids who get diagnosed with autism. Right? And so some of these people are like psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and stuff like that. There are some neurologists who get involved in this, but for the most part, it's like older doctors who are kind of aging out of the profession and looking for a grift, you know? You know, again, we should have kept the pot doctor system going as like, a. Just a way to keep these people off the streets. Right? It's like a boys and girls club for old doctors. No, no, no. Let them give out pot prescriptions.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

It's the farm up north.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So these experts are not mostly doctors, though. And in fact, among the most influential of them is former school teacher Sue Palmer, author of the book Toxic Childhood, published in 2006. And she is one of the first people to look at this in diagnoses of autism, adhd, and other conditions. Not as evidence that we were beginning to understand these conditions and thus correctly recognized how many people had them, but that there had been a, quote, special needs explosion that must have been caused by an environmental factor. She believes it's either junk food or video games generally. Right. There's different theories people have. Palmer is one of the first experts who lumps autism in with adhd, as well as dyspraxia, dyslexia, and several other learning disorders. And again, this is why I started with the story that kid is not diagnosed with autism who burns to death. He's diagnosed with adhd. But that is a death related to this movement that is sparked by Fear of autism, right? Because they just start lumping in with every other thing that we're now diagnosing properly more often because they think, wow, so many more kids have this and probably about the same amount have it, who always have. We just know what it is now. You know. Another biomedical practitioner, Kenneth Bach, lumped autism and ADHD together with asthma and allergies and labeled them before a disorders. In both cases, what these people are doing, these experts are doing, is mixing autism with things that aren't autism in a way that allows practitioners to make the case that there's been an explosion in what they term developmental disorders. It looks even more stark if you're lumping all of these things together as the same kind of thing. Right. And thus they can make the cases that there is a crisis that only bold experimental medicine like they happen to be selling can treat. Right. In other words, by mixing all these things together, they're creating a grouping of potential clients that include basically every parent. Because almost every parent is going to have a kid who has one of these things. Right.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

That is incredible. It's just such a grift. It's unbelievable.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like if you're a mechanic and you're like, yeah, you know, I deal with, I got this great way of fixing busted tires and also, you know, bad spark plugs, fucked up transmissions and it's waving an incident incense stick over your jeep. So bring it in.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Amazing.

[Robert Evans]

As Fitzpatrick writes, Brian Jepson, another Defeat Autism now practitioner, suggests that autism, which he characterizes as both an environmental illness and a multi organ metabolic disease, has increased because the general toxic load in the environment has risen to a point where so many of us have reached our genetically determined toxic tipping point that the human species has now urged edge into a state of what we might call a herd vulnerable. Though everybody is considered to be at risk from environmental dangers, campaigners believe that children are more vulnerable than adults and that babies are the most vulnerable of all. And just as a quick aside, because mercury is probably the most common thing people blame for this, they took that, that mercury based preservative out of vaccines in like 2001. Rates of autism diagnoses continued to rise after we stopped because it didn't, it wasn't doing anything. It has nothing to do with the vaccines. We're just getting better at diagnosing. All of human history has been filled with people with autism. We just didn't call it that.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Anyway, it is amazing that obviously mercury poisoning and Mad Hatters and all those, you know, that Mercury has effects on people?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. Back when they put it in the hats, it definitely had an impact on the population. Yes.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

But we're like, we're totally cool with Botox being botulism, but you can't differentiate between the mercury and in a vaccine.

[Robert Evans]

No. It's also like, chemicals are bad, but also I'll shoot whatever into my kid. If a doctor, if a fake doctor says it'll treat their autism. It's like you're scared of vaccines and you're putting these other shit in your baby. Like, what is wrong with you?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

I know, I know.

[Robert Evans]

Now I think this all kind of helps to explain why that little boy with ADHD dying in a hyperbaric chamber is relevant this episode. It's unclear when hyperbaric therapy first started gaining popularity as an autism treatment, but by the late 90s to the early 2000s, it was well underway as a practice among biomedical experts. That's when they start doing this. Now the most fucked up part of all of this is that hyperbaric therapy is less dangerous than a lot of the treatments that get prescribed because there are some potential negative consequences. When it's done properly. Right. You can have some issues with it because it's super pressurized, but generally people are fine after hyperbaric therapy. Right. If it's done properly. Properly, right. This is not true of a lot of the drug based treatment regimens that develop over the years.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

The first of which when you mentioned hyperbaric therapy, like, like I, I know there are so many, like wealthy families, sure. Have like tents and stuff in their house and they're trying to reverse their kids autism. And it's like, like I, that's. I had never heard of the glass tube. That, that is just horrifying.

[Robert Evans]

It's a nightmare. It's one of the, I know, like Brian Johnson, that Live Forever guy does hyperbaric. And fine, he's in his late 40s, he's got $500 million. I feel like we can sacrifice. He's more. I believe adults, if you want to put yourself in the death chamber and potentially burn to death, I don't give a fuck, do it right. I think people should be allowed to do heroin if they want to. Don't put your 5 year old in these things. They can't make that choice. So the first of these autism drug remedies, remedies that really takes hold is known by the incredibly sus name Secretin. Oh my gosh. Now Secretin is a real thing. It's not like some made up Bullshit. It's a hormone that stimulates the secretion of digestive fluids from the pancreas, Right? And giving people that hormone can be useful for a number of things. Part of why there's a. And it's legitimate researchers who think, well, this might be helpful in treating some of the things that are correlated with autism, because people with autism have a number of different GI tract issues, right? It's very common. I don't know that. I don't think we really know why, because again, we don't. We. We really have a. Still, to this day, we don't know very much about autism compared to, like, what we would like to know. But this is a thing. And so the idea that, like, okay, well, this hormone that stimulates digestive fluids from the pancreas, that might help with some of these side issues. Not an unreasonable point, right? So there's a. They carry out a test because there's a. I think a mom who gives some of this to her kid and she claims a pretty drug traumatic effect. So they. They bring in like two other kids and they do like an initial study on this stuff. And again, just three kids. And this is an unblinded study, right? So everyone getting the drug knows they're getting the drug, both the researchers and the people getting it, which is like, again, if you're kind of just scoring initially, it's not. You shouldn't base anything on this. If things had been done properly and they'd done this first one and be like, okay, maybe we should. We need to do a blinded study now, which does actually happened. If that's all that had happened, I'd say, yeah, nothing wrong here. You know, you do this first thing that shows there might be something to look into. You do a better study with more kids that's blinded next. Whatever. Unfortunately, the media being what it is, always looking for a story, and there being a lot of parents with kids who are interested in this, immediately run with the whole, there's been a miracle cure found, right? As soon as this unblinded study comes out and the biomedical treatment activists in Dan believe that they're dealing with a calamity, right? To them, autism is a disaster that is severe and time sensitive. If you don't really get to fixing this in your kid by the time they're three or four, you have a ticking clock and they're just gonna be fucked forever, right? So you really have to jump on. You can't wait for science, right? And so our friend Dr. Remland, who's the founder of Dan takes out a patent on Secretin before any other studies are done. Secret mt. I don't think you needed to yell.

[Dave]

Patent, by the way.

[Robert Evans]

Sorry.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

So he gives the exclamation point.

[Robert Evans]

He take. He takes out a patent on this hormone as an autism treatment and he sells it to a company called Repligen. Again, so many evil pharma names.

[Dave]

What is happening here?

[Robert Evans]

And all these people are like, the pharma industry's evil, but not Repligen. Okay, man, I don't know. I don't know. I trust his bullishness on this hormone is based entirely on one mom, this lady, Victoria Beck, who claims that her child shows dramatic improvement with Secretin. Such improvement that Dr. Rimlund describes secretin as the most important development in the history of autism. Months later, in the summer of 1999, Secretin makes its way over to the United Kingdom, where TV news crews film a boy with autism before and after Secretin injections, showing dramatic change. Now, UK media is not the only, you know, not alone in this behavior. As writer Nancy Shute notes in a piece for Scientific American, American media outlets, including Good Morning America and Ladies Home Journal, recounted parents joyous tales of children's transformed. Now, as is always the case with this, that video was facilitated by a shady clinic offering a lot of trendy bullshit medicine. Right? That kid who gets filmed is provided with Secretin by this clinic that sells nonsense drugs. Per Fitzpatrick's book, this course was provided by a private GP who also offered treatments for jet lag, chronic fatigue and aging at a cost of £1,500. Oh, wow. So this is just like a. Is this thing not regulated yet? Absolutely. We'll shoot it into you. What, 1500 bucks? Take it. Give it. Hand me your kid. I'll shoot him with whatever.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

I love. That cures everything from autism to jet lag.

[Robert Evans]

I think that's different nonsense drugs, but.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh, I see.

[Robert Evans]

So unfortunately for Secretin advocates, within six months, a double blind study of 60 children had come to very different conclusions. Secretin was at best useless. This was not an at least for treating autism. This was not enough to immediately kill the industry, however, as Nancy shute writes, By May 2005, five randomized clinical trials had failed to provide to reveal any benefit, and interest in Secretin waned. It took years for that to play out, says pediatrician Susan Levy, who helped conduct several of the trials. Research is very labor intensive and progress may be slow. Parents may feel helpless, she adds, and they don't want to leave any stone unturned. And there's like a kind of weird tragedy of commons thing here, which is like, if your kid gets diagnosed with a thing that we don't understand, well, how to help with or even what it is, you may be best just like loving them and trying to help them figure out life and waiting for the science to figure stuff out. Because the alternative is you do what these parents do, which is just you shooting random crap into your child. And I get it's this one of the biggest problems in emergency situations. Obviously there's the issue of people just not the bystander effect, but there's also this issue of people feeling like I have to do something and then making the problem worse. When you're trained in emergency medicine, one of the first pieces of trouble is like, don't just jump in there. You need to evaluate the scene. Because the worst thing you can do is try to go be a hero and add a casualty to the situation, right?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh, my God, of course, you get.

[Robert Evans]

Like a downed power line. The whole family dies rushing to save one person, right? Because the stress of not doing anything, which is sometimes the best thing to do, is really hard. And that's what's going on psychologically here too. So by the point that we are at now, there have been more than a dozen double blind studies that all repeatedly made the same case. Secretin just doesn't work this way. Science and the sheer ineffectiveness of Secretin has eventually brought it to. I don't think it's entirely extinct, but it's not as common as it once was. But obviously a lot of parent children are drugged. And thankfully the side effects of this aren't as bad as the next thing we're gonna talk about. But their parents are robbed blind, right? This is not cheap. Michael Fitzpatrick himself a physician, writes this. One day in surgery, the mother of a boy with autism told me that she had spent the equivalent of his disability living allowance one year on a course of Secretin injections provided at a Harley street clinic. For a single parent reliant on benefits. The outcome of this encounter with a biomedical practitioner was not only disappointment when the miracle cure failed, but financial hardship for the whole family. And obviously these people don't care. They're laughing all the way to the bank. They don't give a shit if any of this works.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah, yeah, that's horrifying.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

All right everybody, we're back. So while these studies are accumulating and the hype over Secretin is dying down, the conmen offering cures to desperate Dan parents spun up a new strategy for intervention. They had long believed that mercury poisoning was a root cause of autism. So of course the logical place to look for a potential cure was treatments that could reduce the amount of heavy metals in a child's blood. Right? If it's metals that are causing it, why don't we look at ways to strip heavy metals from somebody's system, right? And there is a way to do that. It's called chelation therapy. Right. Like hyperbaric therapy. This is real medicine. If you have like lead poisoning, for example, example, chelation therapy can do a lot of good for you, you know, and it's basically, there's a couple of different drugs that could do this, but you dose people with a drug and it converts the lead, the mercury and other heavy metals that are in their body into less dangerous compounds that you kind of pee out. Right, right. So it's great if you're like a miner who has heavy metal exposure, you know.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Sure, sure.

[Robert Evans]

But very few children really do because we don't let them work in mines anymore. Give the Republicans a year. We'll get back to you.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

That was the first m. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Kids with autism very rarely have massive lead levels, you know. Oh, my God. And if they do, it is not generally doesn't have anything to do with their autism. It's because they grew up in like, Flint, Michigan. Right. And maybe then they do need chelation therapy. Some kids do, unfortunately.

[Dave]

It's a lot of Michigan slander in this episode today, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

And it's not slander, it's just a fact. They had a problem.

[Dave]

It is the birthplace of my parents.

[Robert Evans]

And so. Well, they might need some chelation therapy. I don't know. So you.

[Dave]

I won't ask.

[Robert Evans]

Chelation is great if you've got heavy metal exposure, Right? But if you don't, it's harmful because the process of like pulling all of these metals out of. Because we all have heavy metals in us all the time. Right? Trace levels. It's fine. Right? It's fine. Sometimes in some cases you need them, but in other cases it's just fine. Right. Teeny tiny bit of method mercury, very normal. Ask. Ask people who eat a lot of fish. Right? But so if you're, if you're doing this, this has an impact on your body. This is a drug that has a pretty profound effect on you, and that means it does bad stuff. And if you have way too much lead or whatever in you, it's worth that cost. Right. Because the lead is going to cause problems. But if you don't have any problems that are caused by heavy metals, you're going to hurt yourself with this shit for no reason. Reason. Now, before we get into the use of chelation for autism, I wanted to start with. I didn't see this in other articles on chelation therapy, but I found a 2009 piece in Slate by Arthur Allen that talks about the starting point of chelation as a snake oil cure. And it does Start before autism. Well, before it was used for autism, chelation therapy became a craze in the 1980s as a treatment for atherosclerosis in adults. Proponents claimed patients were being harmed by mercury from their fillings. Dentists use this as an excuse to pull teeth and even remove jawbones from their patients. Lloyd Haley, a University of Kentucky chemist, was the high priest of the amalgam wars. When the thymer assault theory emerged on the scene, Haley and other chelationists shifted their focus to autistic children. So again, these are people who are like, yeah, let's get with these crank dentists. Let's push our pulling teeth and jaws out of people giving them chelation therapy. It's your fillings. And then, like, that kind of dies. But then suddenly they see people blaming, you know, mercury for autism, and they're like, guys, we got a new grift. Move on over. Move it over here. These parents aren't looking for shit. So in the year 2000, this was still a fairly small number. It was fairly uncommon for children with autism to undergo chelation therapy. And at least you gotta assume some of the small number of kids with autism actually, like, had heavy metal exposure that was unrelated, but, you know, might have actually needed chelation. By 2005, there were more than 10,000 children with autism in the US regularly undergoing chelation therapy. Almost none of them had any reason to do so.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

10,000 kids.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And this is like a five year period of time from a handful to 10,000. Right. On a regular basis. So unlike secretin, chelation therapy involved dosing children with an extraordinarily powerful drug that had dangerous side effects. Chelation can cause kidney failure, especially if administered in IV form, which is exactly what most biomedical experts advise when treating autism. The standard of care, you only really use IV if you have to. You have other ways. There's like, pills, I think there's creams that are less harsh on your body. And you can generally do that with people who just have heavy metal exposure for a variety of reasons, including to get more money from it. These guys are like, no, you gotta do an iv, right? Which we know is the most dangerous way to do this.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Chelation therapy can also cause heart problems, which, again, is why you don't take this unless you have to. One person who absolutely did not need chelation therapy therapy was Abu Bakr. Tariq Nadama, age 5. He was the son of a physician in Britain who had been diagnosed with autism. Tariq had been. Tariq's family described him as A happy and energetic boy. But despite this, they also searched desperately to cure him, eventually subjecting him to 10 different kinds of quack medical therapy, including hyperbaric chambers. Now, Fitzpatrick makes this incredibly important note when he writes about this in his book. This is characteristic of the unorthodox biomedical approach, which recommends a wide range of interventions, which are often pursued simultaneously. This makes any judgment of which treatment may be working or causing adverse effects impossible. And again, it's one of those things. You're a parent, you're terrified. There's a. You want everything, Give them everything, try everything. But, like, that's not how medicine works. If you give them everything, you don't know what's working or not, right? There's a reason why you're like, well, we're gonna try one thing, we'll see what happens, then we'll try another, you know, because otherwise it's not satisfying. But you just can't do it any other way, right?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

It's like that old sailor saying, right? Like, if you can't tie a good knot, tie a lot of bad ones. Right? It feels. It feels like that. But. But I mean, I was. I was just thinking about, like, the. The IV aspect of it. Like, IV looks like the most scientific of those things, right? Like, if someone prescribed you a cream.

[Robert Evans]

Like, this is serious medicine.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah, yeah. Real science happen.

[Robert Evans]

It's just more dangerous for your. Again, small child.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now, none of these interventions are based in sound medical science or any scientists at all. Science at all. And they don't work. So Tariq's family, as they're trying, they're putting them in hyperbaric chambers and shit. They continue to shop around for experts and diagnoses, and eventually they find themselves leaving the uk, crossing the pond to seek treatment in the United States, which is how they wind up seeking out Dr. Anju Usman, Director of the True Health Medical center in Naperville, Illinois. Now, Dr. Usman happily diagnosed Tariq with heavy metal poisoning. Specifically, she blamed his case of autism on very high aluminum levels. Now, actual blood tests didn't support this. He had low levels of iron. He did have a slightly elevated lead level, although we'll talk about why it's not because he necessarily had normally a high lead level. There's no evidence that his aluminum levels were raised at all. We don't really know why she came to this conclusion. But still, he was prescribed an extensive series of chelation treatments which would ultimately end in his death. Now, Dr. Anju Usman is the still to this Day, as far as I can tell, the director of the True Health Medical center, which brags on its website to have provided integrative and biomedical treatments that enhance traditional medical care since 2000 2003. Her bio on the website says that she got her degree from Indiana from Indiana University Medical School and carried out a residency at a family practice in Cook County Hospital, Chicago. She writes, during residency, I had my first daughter who had severe food allergies and asthma. My second daughter, who was born shortly after, was diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes. My third daughter had chemical sensibilities to environmental substances like cleaning agents, perfumes, pesticides, and synthetic. Even with my extensive education and training, I felt ill equipped to handle their medical issues. I began questioning my role as a physician and healer. Now she that's obviously a difficult situation. It's never I was a sick kid with horrible asthma. I. I have sympathy for that. It's scary, right? She claims that this experience as a mother led her to shift her attention to treating the underlying cause of these disorders rather than the symptoms. And again, she talks about her extensive education. Education. None of it is in doing this. Being a family practitioner does not teach.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

You how to cure.

[Robert Evans]

That's just not how it works. Yeah, that's like I'm an expert race car driver, which is how I know how to drive an 18 wheeler for 37 hours. No, those are different skills. There's maybe some ways in which they correct, but honestly, I would prefer a truck driver do that job. She worked as an alternative health clinic called the Pfeiffer Medical center in Warrenville, which was named after Carl Pfeiffer, a researcher who the CIA had paid to carry out LSD mind control studies as part of MK Ultra. So great namesake for the Pfeifer's Medical Center. No notes. Cool. I will say Dr. Usman's children's allergies were more significant even than she writes on her Bible bio for the center. And I'm not blaming her for that. I understand why. Because her three daughters all suffered severe allergic disorders. One had conjunctivitis so bad it caused cellulitis in her eyes. And her eldest daughter, Priya, died in 2003, two years before Tariq came to her clinic after an anaphylactic reaction to peanuts. So what we've got here is a legitimately traumatized mother who was trained in medical science, but, like, not the kind she's gonna be practicing practicing. And she can't really accept that sometimes horrible things happen to your kids and that sucks. So she goes on a crusade after concluding that aluminum toxicity causes everything from allergies to autism.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

And so she's just like over prescribing for everyone to save every kid essentially.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think that's kind of what's going on.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Kind of comes from a good place.

[Robert Evans]

It comes from like, I understand how you got here, but you are just going to compound harm, you know?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah, I mean it feels like a different type of horrible than like the person who was sending text messages about the right.

[Robert Evans]

Get as many bodies in these chambers. Although actually she has a. She's got a sketchy history with hyperbaric chambers. We'll talk about that. So Usman was a member of DAN and a fellow DAN, Dr. Kenneth Bach agreed with her about aluminum. He has noted that he's disappointed that she hasn't really published much of anything about her findings on on aluminum, which I suspect is because there are dips in a bio for her clinic. Dr. Usman engages in common biomedical practitioner tactics of lumping every issue she can name together and insinuating, hey, these all might be caused by the same environmental toxin, which in her case is aluminum poison. Quote. I wanted to know more about why my children and so many other children and adults in epidemic proportions are suffering from chronic degenerative autoimmune immune disorders such as asthma, allergies, arthritis, diabetes, OCD mood disorders, attention deficit disorder, ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Now, like a lot of these people, Dr. Usman considers ADHD to be part of the autism spectrum. And again, mainstream medical science doesn't really feel this way. On True Medical's website, she provides us with a clear idea of how she and her peers view people with autism. Quote the mission in opening True Health Medical center came from my journey to help my own children with these chronic disorders to lead productive and health healthy lives. This simple dream has been shattered with for so many families. Right. It's again this idea, nobody with autism, no kid can ever live like a happy life. And like, I don't know, maybe if you weren't drugging them, more would. I don't know if Tariq Nadama would have ever been productive in like the capitalist sense of the word. But again, his family describes him as a happy, energetic child. So at least that was in the cards for him until quack biomedical treatment killed him. As I explained last episode, Dr. Usman had diagnosed him with heavy metal toxicity despite there being very little evidence that we have that that was the case. Now, one widespread belief among parents in this community is that by the time a kid is three or four, you don't have much time to reverse the damage that they believe causes autism. So time is of the essence, which is why you have this shotgun approach to extreme therapies. One of my sources for these episodes was a Chicago Tribune article which quotes dan affiliated pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Mumper when she testified for before federal court that quote, we feel some urgency that we can't wait for 10 or 20 years. And that urgency is what leads to treatments like this. So Dr. Usman recommends Tariq undergo EDTA therapy which is like that's a specific type of drug you could do chelation with. The treatment is administered by a different doctor at the center named Roy Carey. Roy is again a retired ENT surgeon. So none of this is within what you'd call his wheelhouse. Right, right. In 2005, Dr. Carey was 68. He was not yet a list Dan practitioner. He did the year after Tariq died complete the intensive 8 hour training necessary to get that requirement. So that's good. Tariq was his first time administering chelation therapy to a child with autism. Now Dr. Usmant's website includes this very friendly photo of her looking like a lovely, competent family doctor. And I want you to see this picture that she puts on her website as I read this description of the therapy that she endorsed and that Dr. Carry carried out on young Tariq. I'm going to quote from Michael Fitzpatrick's book here. Tariq's records indicate that to administer an intravenous infusion he had to be restrained by at least four adults using a papoose board. This device is a flat wooden board with attached fabric straps which are wrapped around the child's body and limbs to prevent struggling during treatment. It was obviously impossible to restrain Tariq for the period of several hours generally recommended for the chelation. Hence in contravention of specific cautions issued by the manufacturer. Tariq, suitably restrained, received this medication over five to ten minutes in a rapid IV push. Oh wow. So they are strapping him to a board, holding him down and instead of again the safest ways like do a pill or a cream, the least safe way is an iv. But when you're even doing an iv it should take hours because you don't want to do this too fast. They are shotgunning hours worth of medication into his body and his 5 year old body in 5 to 10 minutes while he's strapped to a board. Wow. So we have known for a long time that this is bad, right? Doing edta, even if you do it properly, people can develop irregular heart rhythms and have seizures or even die. This is why the standard of IV care is a slow IV infusion, because this kid doesn't like being strapped to a board and shot up with drugs. They do the most dangerous version of the thing and he undergoes this three times. Tariq finally dies after his third infusion. Dr. Carey wasn't even in the room. He gets bored and he leaves it up to another doctor and a nurse to do this.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

He gets bored of the short procedure.

[Robert Evans]

He doesn't describe it as getting bored. That's my editorializing. But like he doesn't want to be there, you know, he's 68. Whatever. He's on a boat or some shit. Per his medical records, Tariq's released during a subsequent lawsuit. During the IV push, Tariq's mother, Marwa Nadama, said that something was wrong. Dr. Mark Lewis took Tariq's vitals and then Tariq went limp. Nurse Teresa Bicker called 911 and helped with CPR while the ambulance was on route. Tariq was taken by ambulance to Butler Regional Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

My God, it's just so, it's so horrifying that like the treatment itself is horrible and then you're shotgunning the treatment and then. And this kid is, is like strapped down and there aren't professionals there. Like the fact that this.

[Robert Evans]

But like they're not doing what they should be, you know?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

If you had anyone whose expertise was insulation therapy, they'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? This isn't how we do it. If you're gonna give him this, don't give him this, but if you are, like, give him a pill.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Fuck yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So a forensic pathologist later identified Tariq's cause of death as diffuse acute cerebral hypoxic ischemic injury and sub endocardial myocardial necrosis. Cary was ultimately charged with involuntary manslaughter. He surrendered his medical license in 2008, but the charges were dropped. Although in the summer of 2009, his license was suspended for six months over the incident and he was placed on a two year probation. So that's where we're ending part one.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

I have to say. Um, I mean, this is the most I've smiled in an episode about children dying. It's so sad.

[Robert Evans]

How else do you fucking, I don't know, deal with this?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

It's awful.

[Dave]

It helps that you yelling Dan is funny every time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it, it does. I, I really knew that that was going to be a load bearing part of Getting people through these episodes, it's.

[Dave]

Been very helpful to me personally.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Me too. Too.

[Dave]

Mango, you have anything you want to plug before the end of part one?

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

You know, we also talk about terrible things, but our terrible things on part time genius are more like the sunniest place to hide your taxes or. Or like why I ain rand took Social Security and was a total hypocrite and stuff like that. But it's, uh. I don't know. I would love for people to check out the show.

[Dave]

Yeah, listen to the Michelin star episode that you guys did when you brought the show back recently. Like, I don't know, it was like a year ago maybe.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dave]

And that was a fun. That was a fun one for me.

[Mangesh Hattikudur]

We did a really fun one recently on Pablo Excobar, the guy who was stealing rare bird eggs. And that's recent too.

[Robert Evans]

Excellent.

[Dave]

That's fun. That's great. I love that. Robert, should we. Should we go?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, let's bounce. Let's get the out of here.

[Dave]

All right, that's part one. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

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Or wherever you get your podcast.

[Dave]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

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